Many programs are available to businesses to organize and save their important data. One of the more pervasive programs is spreadsheet software. Spreadsheet applications are relatively well-known and useful tools. Typical spreadsheet applications simulate physical spreadsheets by capturing, displaying, and manipulating data arranged in rows and columns. To give the data within the spreadsheet more impact, users often change the formatting of data. For example, users often change the background color of a row of important data by changing the fill color of the cells within the row. Thus, the row with the changed background color stands out visually from the other rows of data.
Users also organize their data into more meaningful arrangements. For instance, a user may want the ten most important rows of data to be shown at the top of the spreadsheet. To help users organize their data, spreadsheet applications generally provide a suite of operations to organize the data. For example, many spreadsheet applications provide operations to filter or sort the user's data. To use the operations, the user generally inputs a selection of data to organize and a type of organization (i.e. filter or sort). Some of the operations require other parameters. For example, what data value should be filtered out of the data. The organization operations are very powerful tools that allow the user to quickly and automatically organize their data in a more usable arrangement.
Unfortunately, the organization operations generally operate only on data. Thus, the user can only organize the data if it is text or numbers. The user may have numerous portions of data highlighted by some format, such as row color. However, the user cannot then organize the data by those formats except by manually moving each piece of data themselves. Users either move the highlighted data manually, which is time consuming, or simply do not organize the formatted data, which limits the user to scrolling through all the data to find the highlighted portions. It is with respect to these consideration and others that the present invention has been made.